Could the Royal BC Museum’s future entail more museum locations?

One way or another, a renewal is required for the Royal BC Museum’s aging and seismically vulnerable attraction in downtown Victoria.

The Crown corporation is in the midst of determining its future trajectory after it was directed by the provincial government to reset its $800 million redevelopment plan in June 2022, and go back to the drawing board.

Public consultation on the museum’s future restarted in early 2023, and another phase of the consultation earlier in 2024 sought specific input on how to move forward with renewing the current museum complex on the edge of Victoria Inner Harbour, including a replacement, renovation, or a combination of both strategies.

Significant public consultation is being performed for the current planning process, not just on Vancouver Island, but across British Columbia, as part of a broader outreach strategy that informs British Columbians of the existence of a major provincially owned and operated museum institution that is currently based in Victoria. The new process is also a response to some of the previous criticism that not enough public consultation was performed prior to the short-lived 2022 decision to proceed with the redevelopment.

“I think that in the past, the Royal BC Museum has not done the best job it could to be a true provincial museum to all British Columbians, so I think we own that,” said Tracey Drake, the newly appointed permanent CEO of the Royal BC Museum, in an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized.

“The reason we’re doing face-to-community engagement is to make sure that everyone around the province really has a full understanding of who we are as their provincial museum and archives, what we offer and how they can help us shape the future.”

The museum is in possession of over seven million artifacts and objects, which Drake says are technically worth billions of dollars based on the institution’s risk registry and insurance value.

Earlier this month, the Terry Fox Centre announced a 20-year partnership with the Royal BC Museum to preserve and protect Terry Fox’s family’s collection of objects gathered throughout both the Canadian icon’s short life and the 1980 Marathon of Hope. The Terry Fox Centre is currently in the process of securing a permanent home for its large “All Things Terry” collection.

Due to limited exhibit space, the museum is only able to publicly showcase a tiny fraction of its collections. The vast majority of these artifacts and objects are hidden away in the museum’s underground storage area.

Drake says, “I don’t really think you can put a price tag on what the value of the collections are that represent the collective history of British Columbia. The collections that we care for do not belong to the Royal BC Museum, as we are stewards of the collections. The collections do not belong to the provincial government either, and we are a cloud. The collections belong to the people of British Columbia… [and] I think that is a reason enough and should be the main reason why British Columbians should care about the future of the Royal BC Museum and its archives.”

The existing museum campus in downtown Victoria, built in 1968, is at risk of a structural failure in the event of even a moderate earthquake. The location, below sea level and next to the inner harbour, is also vulnerable to flooding from tsunamis, which could be particularly problematic for the underground level where the storage areas for the collections are located.

The structure’s concrete is also deteriorating, the building systems are failing, and there are occasional sewage backups.

There is a risk of losing the entire collection due to the building’s aging condition and design shortcomings.

Currently, the institution is in the midst of resolving the immediate risks to its collections — the construction of a new secondary facility in the Greater Victoria suburb of Colwood.

Construction on the Royal BC Museum PARC Campus — the new Provincial Archives, Research, and Collections building — first began in Summer 2023, and Drake says the new building is on target for an early 2026 opening. The seven million artifacts and objects currently stored in the underground level of the downtown Victoria museum will be relocated to the safe, modern, purpose-built facilities of the $270 million, 164,000 sq ft building in Colwood.

Although its overwhelming main purpose is for collections, storage, and research, the new PARC building in Colwood will still have some public access components, including large windows that enable the public to peer into the collection laboratories and spaces as well as spaces for some community programming.

Moreover, the completion of the PARC building will enable the institution to proceed with a renewal project of the downtown Victoria campus. This secondary campus was also crucial for the cancelled redevelopment plans for the existing main museum, which Drake says serves the dual purpose as both a cultural organization and one of the largest tourist attractions in Victoria.

“There are other things and places within this province that are important — hospitals and schools that are also seismically at risk, as we are. So I understand that there’s priorities within the province, but seismic issues are a big one for us,” she said.

Another issue with the functional and exhibit spaces of the existing building in downtown Victoria is asbestos. For safety reasons, there are strict limitations on how the interior floor plan and layout can be changed, which means they generally do not remove walls to create a more purpose-designed space for exhibitions.

“The building was built when asbestos was a product that was used widely and freely. As long as we don’t disturb it, there’s no danger to the staff or the visitors to the building, but it does create substantial issues with how we share exhibitions and what we do with our collections,” said Drake.

“We’re not in a position where we can take down walls in exhibitions to make way for a bigger exhibition or to reimagine a space so that it speaks to what that exhibition is.”

Drake notes that so far in the rebooted public consultation process, the input has been “very positive,” and her team is emboldened to create a strategy that brings the museum to more communities across BC, such as considering more digital programming, travelling exhibitions, and/or satellite facilities — smaller exhibition spaces as new smaller museums or within existing cultural centres — to make the collections and programming more accessible to more people.

A satellite museum location in Vancouver is “not out of the question,” but she threw cold water at the idea of the provincial museum taking over the existing heritage courthouse building that will be home to the Vancouver Art Gallery for nearly half a century by the end of this decade.

The Vancouver Art Gallery will vacate the 1906-built courthouse building in 2028, when its $400 million new purpose-designed building, located about six blocks away, reaches completion. The courthouse building’s last major upgrade was conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the space was repurposed from its courthouse functions to art gallery uses.

This former courthouse building is owned by the provincial government, but the City of Vancouver holds a 100-year head lease that first began in 1979 when renovations began to convert it into the art gallery, which sub-leases the space from the municipal government.

“The operation cost of that [courthouse] building would be astronomical, and there’s a lot of deficits within that building as well. So we would be out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak,” said Drake.

“But I love the building, I have so much affection for the aesthetic of that building and what it represents as our current Vancouver Art Gallery… I hope something fabulous adopts that building because it is such an incredible part of the core of downtown Vancouver, and where it sits and all the things that happen in and around that building.”

Sources over the years have also told Daily Hive Urbanized that the Vancouver Art Gallery has practiced a degree of deferred maintenance over much of the past two decades due to the expectation of their eventual relocation.

Some of the current exhibits at the Royal BC Museum include the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, which hails from London’s Natural History Museum, featuring 100 photos of species at risk of extinction. It runs until early June 2024.

The new feature exhibition of Stonehenge, which spans 10,000 sq ft on the second level and will open on May 10, 2024, and run until early January 2025, will showcase the culture and people who built the iconic World Heritage Site.

Another forthcoming exhibit will be Canadian Modern from Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, which will run from June 28, 2024, to February 2025. It will feature 100 culturally significant objects created in Canada.

Drake also shared that some sections of the Royal BC Museum’s longstanding First Peoples Gallery will reopen later this spring. They are working with First Nations to reopen this gallery, which has been closed since early 2022 when much of the permanent galleries were closed.

In July 2023, the museum reopened some areas of the popular Old Town gallery on the third level with some changes. This followed a public outcry over its “permanent” closure.

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